CIA nominee grilled on drone strikes, torture

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WASHINGTON Engaging a high-ranking Obama administration official for the first time in an extensive public discussion of the use of drones for targeted killing, senators Thursday pressed John Brennan, President Barack Obama's nominee for director of the CIA, about the secrecy of the strikes, their legal basis and the reported backlash they have produced in Pakistan and Yemen.

Adding a new element to the roiling debate, the Senate Intelligence Committee's chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she would review proposals to create a new court to oversee targeted killings. She gave no details but said such a court would be analogous to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees eavesdropping on U.S. soil.

Brennan was noncommittal, noting that lethal operations are generally the sole responsibility of the executive branch. But he said the administration had “wrestled with” the concept of such a court and called the idea “certainly worthy of discussion.” Brennan, 57, is a 25-year CIA veteran who has spent the past four years as the administration's senior counterterrorism official.

The hearing came three days after the leak of a Justice Department document explaining the legal rationale for the killing of U.S. citizens who join al-Qaida. On the eve of Brennan's appearance, the White House gave into pressure from lawmakers and said members of the Senate and House Intelligence committees could see the full classified legal memorandum justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. The U.S.-born cleric joined al-Qaida in Yemen and was killed in Yemen by a CIA drone strike in 2011.

Feinstein expressed frustration at the committee's difficulty in getting information about the targeted killing program. She said that while senators were allowed to view two legal memos, they were still seeking eight others.

In his opening statement, Brennan acknowledged “widespread debate” about the administration's counterterrorism operations but strongly defended them, saying that the United States remained “at war with al-Qaida.”

He said later that when CIA drone strikes accidentally kill civilians, those mistakes should be admitted.

“We need to acknowledge it publicly,” he said. “In the interests of transparency, I believe the United States government should acknowledge it.”

But senators repeatedly complained that there is too little transparency about the targeted killing program, sometimes producing misleading information in the media.

“I think that this has gone about as far as it can go as a covert activity,” Feinstein told reporters after the hearing.

The hearing began in chaotic fashion, as protesters stood up and began shouting at Brennan before they were escorted out. One man yelled, “Assassination is against the Constitution!” and one woman held up a sign that read, “Drones Fly Children Die.”

The protests continued as Brennan began his opening statement. After the fifth interruption, Feinstein temporarily stopped the hearing and cleared the room, asking that activists from the peace group Code Pink not be readmitted. The rest of the 3 1/2-hour hearing was conducted in a mostly empty room.

When Brennan resumed his testimony, the top Republican on the committee, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, pressed him on his knowledge of the CIA's previous use of brutal interrogation methods, which were adopted when Brennan was deputy to the agency's No. 3 official.

“I had some visibility into some of the activities there,” Brennan said. “But I was not a part of any type of management structure or aware of most of the details.” He said he opposed coercive methods and expressed objections privately to colleagues.

Unlike Leon E. Panetta, Obama's first CIA director, Brennan declined on several occasions to describe waterboarding as torture. He instead called it “reprehensible” and “something that should not be done.”

Some of the most combative moments of the hearing came as Republicans accused Brennan of disclosing classified information to the media. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, accused him of tipping off television commentators about a double agent who foiled a terrorist plot in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner.

Brennan admitted he told the commentators that the U.S. had “inside control” of the operation but denied the suggestion he had revealed the role of the double agent and said that the FBI is investigating the source of that leak.

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